After a valiant editing effort from Matt Martell last week, I’m back with a Matrix Reloaded of a much more normal length! The Significant Signings section might not be necessary for too much longer this offseason, but I’ll continue to start there as long as players are signing for $10 million or more.

As always, the Offseason Matrices document can be found here.

Significant Signings

Yankees Sign Cody Bellinger for Five Years, $162.5 Million

• Ben Clemens’ Write-Up of the Deal
• Updated Roster Projection
• Updated Payroll Projection

Effect on the Yankees

The overarching theme of the Yankees’ offseason has been to get the band back together, with Bellinger the cherry on top of a very familiar sundae. Ryan Weathers is the team’s one major acquisition from another club, with Bellinger the fifth Yankees free agent re-signed, after Trent Grisham, Ryan Yarbrough, Amed Rosario, and Paul Blackburn. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally, the stars aligned to get us back on the Friday Matrix Reloaded schedule, and boy did they align! Nos. 1, 2, 8, and 9 on Ben Clemens’ Top 50 Free Agents list signed since we last checked in, leaving just two of the top 10 remaining. We also saw a three-team trade reported about a minute after our top free agent signed, and some two-teamers of significance, too.

As always, you can find the colorful Offseason Matrices spreadsheet here. Let’s get into the events of the last 11 days.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to 2026. Time marches on, and so too does the Offseason Matrices document. It has been pretty quiet since I updated you with a Matrix Reloaded last Monday, so much so that we pushed back our return to our usual Friday schedule, knowing that Tatsuya Imai and Kazuma Okamoto would at least sign over the weekend. Assuming the first full week of the New Year is busier, we’ll be back at it on Fridays for the remainder of the offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, and a very happy holiday season, everyone! After skipping last week, it’s a special Monday edition of the Matrix Reloaded, and as a bonus, you’ll also get a Matrix Reloaded this Friday, the first of 2026. You can find the Offseason Matrices document here. You know the drill by now, so let’s get right into the rundown.

Significant Signings

White Sox Sign Munetaka Murakami for Two Years, $34 Million

• Michael Baumann’s Write-Up of the Deal
• Jordan Rosenblum’s Write-Up of Murakami’s Projections
• Updated Roster Projection
• Updated Payroll Projection

Effect on the White Sox

Does signing Murakami make the White Sox any likelier to make the playoffs in 2026 or 2027? Probably not. Does it make them way more entertaining to watch? Absolutely. This is the sort of move that a team like the White Sox should be making whenever it gets a chance — and those chances don’t come around often. In a free agent market full of talented players, two years and $34 million for Murakami’s 80-grade raw power should go down as the biggest upside play of the whole offseason, with boom or bust potential unlike any free agent I can recall. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Friday once again, everyone! The post-Winter Meetings period has seen an absolute flurry of deals added to the Matrix, so I won’t give my esteemed editor too long of an intro to tackle before we get to the past week’s signings, though I did want to share a quick programming note: Matrix Reloaded will be off next week, but as a gift to you, the reader, it will be back the following Monday (December 29) and Friday (January 2) to cover everything that happens in the interim.

And since this is the last Reloaded before the holiday, allow me to wish a very merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate! (I will be celebrating a very Jewish Christmas by watching football and eating sushi.) Now without further ado, here’s what happened around the league in the last seven days. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Friday (and Sad End of Winter Meetings Week), everyone. For those keeping score, my final coffee-consumed-to-transactions-completed ratio in Orlando (including airport coffee and transactions) was 132 ounces to eight transactions. In between kibitzing with my FanGraphs colleagues and the folks in the media who I only get to see once a year or had never met, the Matrix was humming along as always.

As ever, I’ll get into the big happenings of the last seven days, starting with bigger signings and funneling down to the smallest ones, and then going over trades. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Friday, and welcome to this offseason’s first installment of the Matrix Reloaded column. There has already been plenty of activity ahead of the 2025 Winter Meetings, which kick off this Sunday in sunny (well maybe, I haven’t actually checked the weather yet, and also it doesn’t matter because I won’t be going outside) Orlando, Florida. Since this is my first roundup of the winter, let’s start with a refresher on how the Matrix works.

My precious, color-coded spreadsheet has plenty of tabs for your perusal, but my bread and butter is the main FA Matrix tab, which includes a self-explanatory summary of signings at the top and a somewhat less self-explanatory color-coded summary of rumors concerning unsigned players further down. The FA Legend tab right next door will be helpful in decoding it, but here I’ll note that what I classify as a rumor is fairly subjective, as the lines between things like “interested in,” “kicking the tires,” “have looked into,” and “believed to be interested in” are pretty blurry. All rumors are linked to each colored cell, and I encourage reading them for further context beyond how I’ve bucketed them into groups.

With all that out of the way, let’s get into the deals that actually have been completed in the last week or so. For larger moves, I’ll be hitting on three key points: how the deal affects the signing team; how it affects other teams; and how it affects similar players. For smaller deals, I’ll be more rapid-fire and talk only about the signing team; other teams aren’t going to react too strongly to a $2 million bench player inking a new deal. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been one week since the Pirates fired manager Derek Shelton and replaced him with former major league utilityman and Pittsburgh native Don Kelly, who served as Shelton’s bench coach for the entirety of his managerial stint. Firing the manager is one of the first moves made by an underperforming or flat-out awful ballclub, so there’s nothing surprising about Shelton getting the axe after a 12-26 start. But a manager’s record is only as good as the players on his roster and the money spent to build that roster, and Pittsburgh was deficient in both for Shelton’s entire tenure, which spanned five-plus seasons. During that time, the team posted a 308-441 record.

Now with Kelly at the helm, the Pirates are still on a ship that’s at best treading water; they are 3-3 in their six games since he took over, with five of them being decided by just one run. Perhaps Pittsburgh will be better with Kelly managing than it was under Shelton. After all, this is a team that at least has Paul Skenes and Oneil Cruz. However, there is only so much that Kelly can do here. The core problems in Pittsburgh can only be solved with a drastic shift in organizational philosophy, and that starts with owner Bob Nutting and the person tasked with executing that strategy, general manager Ben Cherington. Read the rest of this entry »

As FanGraphs’ payroll and baseball economics czar, I expend a frightening amount of my brainpower thinking about team spending. I’m constantly trying to figure out how much money teams have spent and how much they will spend in the future. Since that stuff is always floating around in my head anyway, I thought it’d be a good idea to do something with all that information. Today, we’ll cover the payrolls for all 30 teams in 2025 and over the next three years.

Let’s start with the payrolls for this season, both real-dollar and luxury tax (CBT) amounts. There are a lot of small nuances that determine how the two numbers are calculated and why they are different, so I won’t get into the nitty gritty here. However, I am going to briefly point out some of the key discrepancies that you should know before we get to the data.

The real-dollar payroll uses the actual money paid out for each year of the contract, plus the prorated portion of the contract’s signing bonus, if it has one. On the RosterResource payroll pages, this is the number shown in the player’s column for each year.

Please note that for contracts with significant deferrals, the league’s Labor Relations Department (LRD) will recalculate their value to a significantly lower number than what is displayed on the RosterResource pages to account for the discounted rate. For each year, we show the money that ultimately will be paid out to each player. So, for example, RosterResource lists Shohei Ohtani’s real-dollar payroll value for 2025 as $70 million, even though his 10-year, $700 million contract is heavily deferred.

The CBT payrolls shown on RosterResource, and in the AAV column for each player, do accurately reflect how the league discounts contracts. I wrote more about Ohtani’s deal in particular here. Ken Rosenthal wrote more about the nuances of Ohtani’s contract’s three values ($700 million, about $460 million, and about $280 million) here; RosterResource only accounts for the first two values, while the league’s LRD calculation reflects the third.

CBT payrolls include ancillary expenses that the real-dollar payrolls don’t, including player benefits (estimated at $17.5 million this year), payment into the $50 million pre-arbitration bonus pool ($1,666,667 per team), and minor league salaries for 40-man roster players (estimated at $2.5 million per team).

Ultimately, CBT payrolls will correlate strongly to real-money payrolls, since many contracts are evenly distributed anyway, so they’ll count the same for each season by both calculations.

OK, now that we’ve got that out of the way, here are the top-line payroll numbers for the 2025 season:

The Dodgers may well end up as the first team in major league history to have a $400 million payroll; Clayton Kershaw should earn at least some of the $8.5 million available to him in incentives. On top of that, even though Los Angeles sure looks like a juggernaut right now, we should still expect president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman to make additions at the deadline that could increase payroll even more.

Flipping the chart on its head shows a couple of unsurprising bottom-dwellers in the A’s and Marlins. The A’s are successfully over the $105 million CBT threshold needed to avoid having the burden of proof placed upon them if the Players’ Association were to file a grievance against them related to how they allocate the revenue sharing dollars they receive. (Their real-dollar payroll is significantly lower because the contracts signed to get over that threshold are all backloaded.)

The Marlins, on the other hand, are evidently rolling the dice on being able to weather a potential grievance, with The Miami Herald reporting that the club does “not believe [it is] at serious risk of losing a grievance in part because of the wording of the collective bargaining agreement.” In the event of a grievance, the Marlins would argue that they are using revenue sharing dollars “in an effort to improve performance on the field” (which is all that the CBA stipulates the money must be used for) because they’re spending on non-roster expenses like front office augmentation and player development fortifications. Helping their cause is the fact that grievances against the team from 2017 and 2018 are still pending; in the club’s eyes, this is a can that can be kicked quite far down the road.

And now, let’s take a look at how teams are distributing their budgets:

Each team exists within its own context of what it’s trying to accomplish with its payroll, and having a higher or lower percentage within a given category doesn’t inherently mean anything good or bad. But it’s especially interesting to me to look at the middle column, or the percentage of real-dollar payroll allocated to arbitration-year players.

Since most of those players are between one and three years away from reaching free agency — along with the small group of Super Two players who have four years left — sorting from highest to lowest is a great way to answer the question: “Which teams have their rent coming due the soonest?” In other words, both Beltway teams have over a quarter of their payrolls hitting free agency within the next three years; will either of them make the effort to re-sign or extend key players like Cedric Mullins, Adley Rutschman, Nathaniel Lowe, and MacKenzie Gore? Those aren’t all extremely urgent decisions, but they’re much more at the forefront than, say, what becomes of Gunnar Henderson or Dylan Crews.

Speaking of the future, here’s what teams have allocated in payroll for the next three years:

Just so we’re all clear on what we’re looking at here: Future Commitments includes only guaranteed salaries from free agent contracts and extensions; we’re not including any projected earnings for pre-arbitration or arbitration-year players. Because of how our data is displayed on the payroll pages, single-year player options (highlighted in green on the payroll pages) are not included (like Pete Alonso), but opt outs for longer deals are (like Alex Bregman) factored into these figures. Essentially, we’re summing the white text on the payroll pages and ignoring any of the color-coded cells.

Even though the mechanism is the same in that the player still controls the cards, we create this line of demarcation (one year left on the deal is a player option, anything longer is an opt out) for a couple reasons. One is that the CBA itself makes that distinction, and the other is because it more closely matches how club, mutual, and vesting options work: They’re a single year 99% of the time. Opting out is a longer-term decision that’s also generally easier to make; if you’ve got multiple years left on your deal, you’d better be darn sure you can do better in free agency if you leave.

As I said before, each team is going to operate within its own budgetary constraints. The fact that the Diamondbacks already have $110 million on the books for 2026 may well make them more inflexible than the Dodgers or Mets this coming offseason, even though the Snakes have much less in the way of commitments.

Having more tied up in the future doesn’t mean that the team has less to do compared to teams with fewer dollars on the books, either. The Mets’ $202 million includes just eight players on guaranteed deals; they don’t have a particularly impactful arbitration class, and their only significant pre-arbitration player is Mark Vientos. They’ll have more to accomplish than the Red Sox, who are at $175 million, a total that includes Bregman. Excluding Bregman, Boston has nine players locked up, plus Tanner Houck and Jarren Duran, both key cogs, in arbitration.

Ultimately, my job is to compile all of the data, not necessarily to make sweeping declarations or draw any grand conclusions about payroll. I always caution that there’s a lot of nuance and team-specific context that often gets lost in more generalized comments, and the purpose of this summary isn’t to tell anyone how to think or feel about how teams are spending their money. That said, I’m looking forward to a spirited discussion in the comments section, and I’m happy to answer any team-specific questions you may have.

Baseball analysts and team managers alike love to remind players and fans that Opening Day rosters are just one of many that each team will feature over the course of the season. And while that’s certainly true, the fanfare of making an Opening Day roster is an accomplishment that doesn’t get topped until players are lucky enough to find themselves as one of the 26 names on a postseason ballclub.

While Thursday’s rosters have already proven themselves to be ephemeral (RIP to Nick Gonzales’ ankle), it’s still a good opportunity to take a look back at how the rosters were constructed. Our Active Roster Breakdown will always be up-to-the-minute with the latest moves, if you’d like to peruse that at any point as rosters evolve throughout the season.

The Guardians’ modus operandi for years has been to build homegrown winners, and it’s unsurprising to see the Cardinals right there with Cleveland in that category considering how little St. Louis did this offseason. Conversely, because Padres president of baseball operations A.J. Preller keeps trading away their homegrown players, there are only three of them on San Diego’s Opening Day roster.

The teams that turn to free agency most are the ones that either have struggled to produce homegrown talent in recent years or, like the Padres, have traded away the top players in their system. Either way, because they lack capable internal options, they rely on the open market to fill out their rosters.

On the flip side, both Florida teams stayed out of the free agent market almost entirely. Nearly two-thirds of the Rays’ Opening Day roster (17 of 26) were acquired via trade. Meanwhile, the Marlins have been aggressive on the waiver wire since Peter Bendix was hired as president of baseball operations after the 2023 season, and the players they’ve claimed are not just non-roster flotsam; Derek Hill and Otto Lopez are in their starting lineup, Connor Gillispie is their no. 2 starter, and Jesus Tinoco is a key setup man.

Does it portend badly for the Dodgers that they’re the oldest team in baseball by over nine months? Well, no, they’re the Dodgers. But this list does reflect where a lot of teams are in their contention cycles. The Dodgers are in win-now mode, and while they’ll seemingly be in win-now mode in perpetuity, they’ll be doing that with older players. Even so, an aging roster doesn’t necessarily guarantee a winning one. As things stand, the Blue Jays, who have the fourth-oldest roster in the majors, appear to be nearing the end of their contention window. And that window could slam shut entirely if Vladimir Guerrero Jr. — who, at 26, actually brings their average age down — departs in free agency after the season.

Most of the teams on the other end of the age spectrum are either at the start of rebuilds (Marlins, White Sox) or are making progress but aren’t quite ready to contend yet (Nationals, A’s). Their average ages will get older as their roster gains experience and their window of contention opens. The Rays are always going to be young because they typically trade their homegrown players when they get older and more expensive.

A slightly different way to look at this is by years of MLB service, which generally correlates with age but not always. For example, the Reds are a little bit older than the league-average team, but they opened the season with 20 players who have fewer than six years of service time. That’s because Cincinnati’s roster includes late bloomers Jose Trevino, Sam Moll, and Ian Gibaut.

Sticking with their youth movement, the Marlins’ most experienced players are Sandy Alcantara and Cal Quantrill, who have a combined 12 years and 60 days of MLB service entering the year. That’s a figure topped by 19 individual players on Opening Day rosters.

Lastly, let’s look at the countries where each team’s players were born.

Specifically, I’d like to highlight the players from the least-represented countries in the majors.

Aruba: Xander Bogaerts (Padres), Chadwick Tromp (Braves)

Australia: Curtis Mead (Rays)

Bahamas: Jazz Chisholm Jr. (Yankees)

Germany: Max Kepler (Phillies)

Honduras: Mauricio Dubón (Astros)

Peru: Jesús Luzardo (Phillies)

South Africa: Rob Refsnyder (Red Sox)

Baseball truly is a global game, and I hope the game continues to grow internationally so that we can have players from more countries in the years to come.